Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist

Book excerpt: "By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Stael and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Stael's Corinne and Sand's Consuelo combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil's Sibyl, and Dante's Beatrice. Lewis illustrates how the resulting Corinne/Consuelo effect is exhibited in scores of English artist-as-heroine narratives, particularly in the works of these four prominent writers who most consciously and elaborately allude to the French literary matriarchs." "Exploring a connection between French and English literature and providing fresh insight, Germaine de Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist makes a major contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century feminism."--Jacket.